Kingsley Ben-Adir Talks 'Bob Marley: One Love' Movie & Capturing The Reggae Icon's inimitable Spirit
Kinglsey Ben-Adir as “Bob Marley” in Bob Marley: One Love from Paramount Pictures. Photo Credit: Chiabella James © 2023 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
It's not an easy task to step into the shoes of a legend, especially not one as prolific as Bob Marley. Yet Kingsley Ben-Adir (One Night in Miami..., Barbie) fearlessly takes on the challenge in Bob Marley: One Love, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green (Monsters and Men, King Richard). The weighty biopic (which hits theaters February 14) focuses on a few pivotal years in the music pioneer's life in the late '70s before his death in 1981.
That time span includes an assassination attempt in the midst of a political war in Jamaica, recording the monumental Exodus album and seeking refuge in London. This all occurs while Marley is attempting to maintain the relationship with his wife Rita (played by The Woman King's Lashawna Lynch) and raise his children (one of which, the Grammy-winning Ziggy Marley, is an executive producer).
Below, EDITION speaks to Ben-Adir on his experience learning about the man behind the music.
Bob Marley had such an impassioned and magnetic spirit. I’d love for you to take me through the steps of capturing his essence.
That's exactly how I felt. When the audition came through, one of the first things I watched was him performing [the song] “War" at the Rainbow Theatre in London, which I hope that everyone gets to see because the recording of that performance… something special was going on. I spoke to Junior Marvin and Tyrone [Downie, both members of The Wailers] who eventually told me that they upped the tempo that night. So what I was watching was a version of all of the songs that were a higher tempo and a higher speed. So the physicality of it is much more intense. And the music is much more upbeat and hot and fast. I remember watching that, and feeling like you said, the magnetism was extraordinary. And I guess that it felt pretty dangerous.
I'm not a musician but there's a kind of excitement I just felt that I should probably get an audition tape together. There's nothing to lose. And then within no time at all, I was with the family and with Ziggy. I started to get to know Bob and learn about him as a human being, as a father and as a person. I got an insight into his struggles and what he went through from the people who knew him and loved him. And it wasn't just a family, it was Bob's friends from Trenchtown who knew him before he was famous. I spent a lot of time with someone called Lego. He knew Bob and Rita from when they were 14-15. They were kids. Lego’s got a studio on Orange Street. So I spent a day with him. And we just talked about Bob.
I spoke to so many people in Jamaica who knew Bob, I lost count. And I can't even remember everyone's name because there were so many. [I got to] really understand that Bob was a man from the ghetto in the trenchtown, it was rough. And he went on an extraordinary journey in a really short space of time. What it cost them and what it took to put all of that music together wasn't the Western idea of Rasta [where you] chill out and smoking and relaxing. Working in the studio, Bob was intense. He was a workaholic in many ways. He was up at the crack of dawn. He was known by the people who loved him and worked with him as the general, as the Tuff Gong, as Skip.
He also had this beautiful side to him, which is this humble gentle poet. A kind man humble man. So, as a character, there’s huge complexity there. And I only got to know that from spending time with the people who knew Bob because the books don't really touch on it in the same way. So I was very lucky in my process because the process was was his family, his friends, his colleagues [who] educated me on who he was and what this movie needed to be. And the instruction from the family and from Jamaica was that we need to honor all sides of his character. We need to honor his voice and his language and the way that Bob spoke, and there was never ever going to be a version of this film where there wasn't going to be in full Jamaican Patois because that's what the family wanted. That's the only thing I was ever going to do. And that's what the studio agreed on from the beginning as well.
Kingsley Ben-Adir as “Bob Marley”, Anna-Sharé Blake as “Judy Mowatt”, Lashana Lynch as “Rita Marley”, and Naomi Cowan as “Marcia Griffiths” in Bob Marley: One Love from Paramount Pictures. Photo Credit: Chiabella James © 2023 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
I'm glad that decision was made because it felt even more authentic. I feel like someone as grand as Bob, it's not a persona that you can mimic. You really have to feel it. How were you able to turn that off and get back to your center? Because I know, that sometimes embodying someone of that grandeur could be a little bit weighty.
I hope don't go too deep off-track here. I feel like to understand the spirit of someone. I think from an acting point of view, it's about understanding trauma and understanding what happened to them as a child, and how people behave. This idea of safety kept coming up for me because the movie starts with an assassination attempt. And what does it mean to not feel safe? What does it mean to be displaced? What does it mean to have that level of trauma when you nearly die, and all your band members nearly died, and your wife nearly dies? I had to really meditate on that and go, “Hang on a minute.” And then the next minute is in London, and he put his album together in a few months. So out of that trauma came this incredible piece of work: Exodus.
Making sure I understood the connection of that was really, really important. Spending time with his friends and family and knowing that Bob was from the ghetto was so important. So he went from the streets of Trenchtown to superstar. When he brought his music out into the culture … it's still with us today. His music lives on and is going to keep living on. He was a genius. You only get to that level that Bob did with his work when you put the amount of hours that he put out. He dedicated his life to music and you can only dedicate your life to something like that if you need it. And he needed it, Bob found safety in music And this is my interpretation from everything I've heard from everyone. He found that in music, and in God, and spirituality, and football. They didn't have therapists back then. They couldn't go to a psychologist once a week.
He had to channel it through the music.
If he was feeling a certain way, he goes to the guitar. And I learned to play the guitar, because I wanted to understand what it was that Bob did every day at five o'clock in the morning when everyone's asleep. And he wrote songs, and he played the guitar. I started to understand when I was feeling scared, or when I was feeling the pressure, that actually if you pick up the guitar for three and a half hours, time goes very quickly and you feel a lot better when you get off it. So in my own way, I found safety in this. Acting saved me in many ways. I didn't know what I was going to do. I would have been in a whole heap of trouble growing up as a kid and then I found something that made me feel safe and made me feel connected.
Speaking of that connection, after watching the movie I felt even more proud to be of Jamaican heritage. Your mother has a Trinidadian background so I would love to know if you feel more connected to the Caribbean diaspora after working on this film.
Massively, I’ve got my Trinidadian passport application on the way. My grandparents came over from Trinidad and Tobago in the late ‘50s and they stayed here [in London]. They worked as nurses just after the war and I grew up in my grandparents' house. But a lot of my friends are Jamaican, and I've grown up with Jamaicans here. So, I understood the pressure from the beginning. I mean, I knew the cost. There was no part of me that was learning about that. I knew [about the culture] before I even went [into the project]. You don't mess up Bob Marley. He’s not one of them ones.
Kingsley Ben-Adir as “Bob Marley” and Director Reinaldo Marcus Green in Bob Marley: One Love from Paramount Pictures. Photo Credit: Chiabella James © 2023 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
There's a lot of eyes on you. I remember when the news first came out, people were like, “I wonder how Kingsley's going to pull this off.” But I think did an exceptional job, even with nailing the accent. I know you worked with linguistic professors. It’s really understanding that patois is not just a dialect, it's a whole language.
I would have been that person too. I would have read in the paper and went, “Who?” I would have had that opinion too. So, I got it from the beginning; that never surprised me. I think that was an appropriate reaction. But I don't people don't know me. So I hope now they understand that the work that was going to go into it. We weren't messing around with it. It was the language and the culture and how Bob spoke were the most important things. It was. It was the first conversation I had with Ziggy and Brian Robbins, the head of Paramount [Pictures]. We all agreed that heavy patois and how Bob spoke — and he spoke in heavy patois when he wasn't talking to white journalists. No actually, I tell a lie. If he was speaking to a white journalist that he didn't like, his patois would be even more heavy. So the authenticity was always top priority. That's from the studio, that's from the family and from me, I had Jamaicans in my house. I'd have them there so long, they just want to leave because they were like, “I don't know what he’s saying in this.” But sometimes you just can't understand Bob because he spoke in his own way.
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Photography by: Chiabella James